In case of emergency, break glass

It’s a sentence we’ve all found ourselves assimilating: ‘In case of emergency, break glass’, the very serious seeming red pockets, dotted around walls within schools, sports halls, libraries, gyms, workplaces, and so on. Red framing the dreaded, yet tantilizing, blackness underneath the glass, where there lies a button, to be pressed ‘only in the event of a fire’. In a glass coffin.

The only chance it will ever have, of the sudden gushing in of Oxygen, the release from that vaccuum, is very likely to be the last, should the building it listens out for succumb to flames.

Breaking the glass means danger, it means fear, and decisive action. You never really want to be the person who has to take the plunge and crack the surface open like an egg.

Because once it’s done, it’s done. That glass has broken in it’s own unique way, patterns of shards splitting, which can never be the same again.

It is the same with the scars on your skin, which crosshatch the forearm, like it has been deliberately shaded by the pencil of some artist, trying to persuade an unknown viewer of depth, dimension and shape. They want to make the picture seem more real. Contrary to the illusion of glass- the sheen which polishes the emergency button, giving it a glimmering surface, like invisible skin.

It is always the same- you never really knew what was there until it was lost. Never saw what was so perfectly intact, and marveled at it for being so, solid. Until you ripped it to ribbons, and couldn’t go back.